It was wonderful, of course, but no more wonderful than a thousand other happenings in ’57.  All laws of probability and general average were upset that year, when sixty thousand men held down an armed continent.  Even stranger things were happening than that two bullock-carts should dawdle through a rebel-seething district in the direction of a plundered, blood-soaked rebel stronghold; stranger even than that on the foremost bullock-cart a lean and louse-infested fakir should be squatting, guarded by British soldiers, who marched on either hand; or that a Rajput, who could trace his birth from a thousand-year-long line of royal chieftains, should be sleeping in the bullock-cart behind, followed closely by a black charger with a British saddle on its back, which ate corn from the tail-board of the wagon; stranger things, even, than that a British sergeant should be marching last of all, with his stern eyes roving a little wildly but his jaw set firm and his tread as rigid and authoritative and abrupt as though he were marching to inspect accouterments.

In more than a dozen places, about a dozen men were holding a fort against an army.  They were using every wile and trick and dodge that ingenuity or inspiration could provide them with, and they were mostly contriving to hold out.  But there were none who did anything more daring or more unusual than to march to the attack of a city, with a hostile fakir in the van, and nothing else but their eleven selves and their rifles to assist them.  There is a tremendous difference between defending when you have to, and attacking when you might retire.

XII.

There were many more causes than one that worked together to make possible the entry of Brown and his little force into Jailpore.  They were brave men; they were more than brave and they held the ace of trumps, as Brown had stated, in the person of the fakir known as “He.”  But luck favored them as well, and but for luck they must have perished half a dozen times.

They marched the whole of the first afternoon, and met no one.  They only overtook little straggling parties of rebels, making one and all for Jailpore, who bolted at the sight of them, imagining them probably to be the advance-guard of a larger force.  The very idiocy of marching eleven strong through a country infested by their enemies was in their favor.  Nobody could believe that there were no more than eleven of them.  Even the English could not be such lunatics!

That night, they rested for a while, and then went on again.  During the day following they lay in a hollow between some trees and rested, and slept by turns.  They suffered agonies from the heat, and not a little from hunger, and once or twice they were hard put to it to stop the Rajput’s charger from neighing when a native pony passed along the nearby road.  But night came again, and with it the screen of darkness for their strange, almost defenseless caravan.  Once or twice the fakir tried to shout an alarm to passing villagers, but the quick and energetic application of a cleaning-rod by Brown stopped him always in the nick of time, and they came within sight of the battlements of Jailpore without an accident.